Looking For Bobbi Gottlieb
by Jane Paznik-Bondarin
I just turned sixty. No surprise, this. Each year I have been counting, and celebrating, a signpost in a journey that may be more than half over, but nevertheless still feels exciting, new, uncharted. And while the sense of limitlessness is more fleeting, the limits still appear at decently remote borders. I am not without trepidation, however, that I take this next lap accompanied by experience in place of youth. I say this, I know it, but I am still surprised that people respond to the gray-haired woman they see, not the hopeful, energetic girl I still feel myself to be.
It is a time of taking stock. Who were we when we made the decisions that we did not know would shape our lives but did: where we went to college, what we chose as professions, what cities we lived in, and with whom? And the people whose laughter filled our ears and whose innocent inattention brought us low? I wonder who they grew to be and what lives they lived. I am not alone in wanting to know. Websites spring up daily, inviting us to find a classmate, old love, or ancestor. Technology lets us search the valley of youth as we approach the precipice of age.
Some people carry their past with them. At dinner parties, I am introduced to fellow guests whom my hosts say they’ve known since college, high school, even the old neighborhood. But there are no people like this in my life. And until recently, I haven’t looked to find them. Oh, I admit to the furtive Google in the middle of the night: the unrequited high school crush who became a renowned computer game wizard, the college boyfriend who went to makes pots in Alaska. I never found him. It would have helped to have loved people with uncommon names.
I have been easier to find. My life’s pond is deeper than wide, and just to make things easy, I live less than twenty miles from the house in which I grew up. In New York City, though, you can change identities by moving a few blocks, and change whole destinies when you cross town, or over a bridge.
About a year ago, a friendly but unknown voice on the telephone asked, “Is this Janie Paznik?” I laughed. It’s been a long time since anyone called me that, and even then, mostly at home. The persona that greets the world is resolutely Jane, while an irrepressible Janie hides inside. She emerges if you love me, and if you’re in the right mood. My parents called me Janie, except when they were angry, when full names were invoked; “Laura Jane, you will remove that mess from your dresser-top.” They are long gone, and I still struggle to clear the tops of tables, dressers, and nightstands. My eighty-four-year-old uncle calls me Janie, as do my cousins and their children. It’s not an age-thing; what people call me is based on sentiment and habit. My late husband called me Janie; some other people find Janie inside Jane. I can never tell who will or why they do. It always seems to be the right people, and it always sounds right.
The voice belonged to Johnny, now Jonathan; actually Rabbi Jonathan Panitz, USN, Retired. We’d attended Camp Ramah in Canada together in 1960 and 1962, an experience I remember fondly if faintly. Ramah is an educational camp run under the auspices of the Jewish Theological Seminary, “The camping arm of Conservative Judaism.” You could learn to swim and to speak Hebrew at the same time. As I remember, one had to do the latter in order to do the former. The camp did a good job then, as I hope it still does, inculcating a pride in identity that shaped lives.
In September, 1962, though, we began college. That incarnation so heavily wrote upon me as to fade the ink on life’s earlier pages. If you think you know where this story is headed, you’d be wrong. Johnny wasn’t looking for me but for Bobbi Gottlieb, who’d been his girlfriend and my best friend. And if you think the story’s headed in THAT direction, guess again: in the year since that first phone call, Bobbi Gottlieb has yet to be found. There’s a Bobbi Gottlieb in Southern California, and one in Pittsburgh, PA. Neither of them is she. We heard she lived in Israel, we heard she lived in Brooklyn. If she left a breadcrumb trail, birds have long since devoured it.
To find Bobbi Gottlieb though, Johnny reconnected the rest of us. In the summertime, more than fifty sixty-plus-year-olds will meet in Toronto. Johnny’s making us buttons with pictures of our young selves. On Friday night, choruses of “Oh my God, it’s you” will reverberate through the hotel. A memory returns, and I am nervous. Will I feel intimidated, as I once did, by the smarter, prettier, cooler? Age and experience may level the playing field and fill out the uniform, but my inner gawky adolescent crouches inside, waiting.
By sundown Saturday, songs will have been sung and memories shared of Flag Day (I’ve seen the pictures), the camp play (Oklahoma, in Hebrew), and who had a crush on whom. On Sunday, we’ll drive to the campsite, two hours north, in the Muskoka region, on Skeleton Lake. I remember endless blue water framed by trees against a blue sky with clouds like white cotton candy. Will the lake seem smaller, the place less magical, like when you walk by your high school building, once so imposing and terrifying, after you’ve spent four years at a university?
I am amazed by one thing: how well I chose friends before I grew into my own skin. In the last year, I have connected with a friend from elementary school, one from junior high school, a few from Camp Ramah, and a flat-mate in Jerusalem from the summer of ‘67. Each is someone I held dear once; each claims my heart anew. How could I have known then that they would turn out to be people who think deeply about the cultures in which they live, and whatever else they have accomplished in the world, who find their deepest joy in having loved and parented. With each, it feels as if life has simply interrupted a conversation we continue now. Trust and comfort built long ago, our words and silences connect us through time.
So far, just one person is missing from the list: Bobbi Gottlieb. I keep hoping Johnny will find her.
Jane
Paznik-Bondarin lives in New York City.
Her email is: 